A lecture to discuss the ways harm reduction policies can be utilized as a way to reduce drug overdoses in the United States was given by Mercer and William Paterson University Professor of Sociology Michael Prohaska on Wednesday, February 12 in the Communications Building as part of Mercer’s Distinguished Lecture Series.
The talk, titled “Pragmatism vs. Puritanism: Harm Reduction Policies Applied to Drug Use in The United States,” looked at drug use as a medical problem and not as a criminal or moral issue.
The talk was sponsored by Professor Leonard Winogora, who serves as the on-site coordinator for William Paterson University at Mercer.
“I think it’s time we had a conversation in America and revisit the drug laws because they’ve been extremely ineffective. And we’re not addressing critical issues in our society,” Winogora said.
Prohaska emphasized that harm reduction policies seek to maintain the dignity, agency, and self-empowerment of the drug user.
“Harm reduction does not encourage the use of drugs at any time,” Prohaska said.
One harm reduction strategy explored in the lecture was needle syringe exchanges, where people come in with used hypodermic needles and swap them for clean needles. According to the Amfar database, 40 states in the U.S. currently have at least one syringe exchange program. These exchanges are shown to be safe and effective, according to Prohaska.
Safe injection sites were another harm reduction strategy discussed by Prohaska. These sites are places people can go and use intravenous drugs. Nurses are on-site to monitor this process, though they cannot actually inject the user. There is usually a safe room on-site for the people to go to after they inject so that they do not have to immediately go back out onto the street.
“According to the media & government, drug users are junkies. There is no in between,” Prohaska said.
This stigmatization only serves to marginalize drug users and push them into a corner, according to Prohaska.
We simply try to sweep things under the rug and pretend they don’t exist, rather than address the real issues and find fundamental ways of resolving them,” Winogora said.
This results in addicts using drugs in unsafe surroundings, out of the public eye.
“It wasn’t the drugs that killed us, it was the environment where we took the drugs,” said one lecture attendee, who did not want to give his name because he is a former addict.
Prohaska also discussed how “Protestant ethics are ingrained in who we are [in America]” and because of that drug users are looked at as being morally bankrupt.
When it comes to drug use, Prohaska said that “Self-indulgence is sinful because it affects productivity”
The lecture was presented at a time when the United States is facing a major opioid epidemic. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) overdoses resulted in 70,237 deaths during 2017, the year for which there is most recent complete data. Among these, 47,600 (67.8%) involved opioids, representing a 12.0% rate increase from 2016.
Further, according to the New Jersey Department of Law and Public Safety, there were 109 suspected opioid-related overdose deaths in Mercer County in 2019.
Nearby Philadelphia has been hit so hard they are planning on opening the nation’s first supervised injection site as a way to try reduce drug overdose. Philadelphia has had one of the highest rates of death from unintentional drug overdoses among the nation’s largest cities and counties, according to a 2019 survey by The Pew Charitable Trusts.
“Hopefully people will take what’s going on now, in our culture, and move forward to harm reduction and not do a 360 and fall back on the War on Drugs, which would be going backwards,” Prohaska said. “We need to go forwards and harm reduction is forwards.”
